By Drew Dietsch
| Published
We’re pretty spoiled these days with good to even great video games getting equally or even better adaptations into movies and television series.
Prime Video’s first season of Fallout was a lot of fun that felt right in line with its source material’s tone and vision, and HBO’s The Last of Us has been a gargantuan success both creatively and to whatever numbers matter to the data fiends at Warner.
But it took a long time for video game adaptations to find their footing. Because in the past, they were often mediocre or downright terrible. Not you though, my sweet Mortal Kombat, I love you. Mwah.
Regardless of their quality, these flicks were seen as punchlines for a very long time.
And while there were some more obscure earlier adaptations we could dive into in a later video if y’all are interested, let us know in the comments, one major theatrical release kicked off the video game adaptation craze back in, you guessed it, loyal viewers, our favorite decade, the ‘90s.
It was the Super Mario Bros. movie, before that other one your kids have watched a hundred times officially got that title.
Super Mario Bros. released in 1993 and if you were around the right age, it was one of the biggest events of your entire year. And it is mostly remembered now as an enormous failure.
And even as I write this, you can’t stream Super Mario Bros. on any streaming service in the U.S. at all.
Why was this flick such a historic and unforgettable disaster of a concept, production, and box office release? And how has it managed to become a beloved cult classic?
How Super Mario Bros. (1993) Happened
Our story doesn’t begin in the Mushroom Kingdom. First, we have to exit Gotham City, preferably via a green pipe.
After the unprecedented success of Batman in 1989, studios began greenlighting bigger, bolder, and bank-breaking productions in an effort to find their own franchise blockbuster.
Attempts at making Super Mario Bros. had been developing in the ‘80s, but finally solidified in the early ‘90s when Nintendo struck a deal with Lightmotive, a smaller British studio who were allowed a surprising amount of creative freedom.
That’s because, according to producer Roland Joffé, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi felt the Mario brand was strong enough to weather any American movie iteration, and he was open to the very different take the movie was pitching.
And before we crack open that egg, we have to take a detour to…
Back in the old Hollywood days, if there was a huge production in town everyone believed was gonna be a smash hit, you’d see studios big and small race to get their own spin on it out as soon as possible.
That’s how James Cameron’s The Abyss gave us Deep Star Six, Leviathan, and the MST3K favorite, Lords of the Deep.
The same attempt occurred when studios knew dino-mania, or as us oldheads call it, Prehysteria!, was going to sweep the world in 1993 with the release of Jurassic Park.
And amidst that clutch of Carnosaur, We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story, and Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story, was also birthed the plot for Super Mario Bros., hoping to use a tenuous connection to Super Mario World’s Dinosaur Land to get away with chasing 1993’s dino dollars.
Roland Joffé employed Max Headroom creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel to direct and lead the creative vision for the movie, and the idea they all came up with took the cartoon fantasy of the games and reinterpreted it into a dark sci-fi alternate universe dystopia where dinosaurs evolved into the prominent sentient beings on the planet.
Yeah, it’s gonna get weird.
A Dark Sci-Fi Take
This dark, edgier, and deliberately different take on the concept was seen as the right direction to go because it has worked for both Batman and another kid-targeted franchise movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
It’s hard to think of now, but before Tim Burton’s Batman, this was what most people around the world thought of when you said, “Batman.”
Same goes for the Turtles, who were most popular thanks to their very kid-friendly cartoon series.
When these properties made the jump to the big screen at the end of the 20th century, the thought was that more serious takes on the characters would widen the potential audience to both older kids and adults.
And so, after a two-fisted effort to shove in dinosaurs and darken up the Mushroom Kingdom, the filmmakers felt they had a take worth turning into a blockbuster hit.
In Super Mario Bros., the meteor that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs actually created two universes: our world, and a world where dinosaurs evolved into humanoid beings that create a cyberpunk city called Dinohattan.
We’re just getting started.
Dinohattan is run by the fascist President Koopa, played by the demented Dennis Hopper. His plan is to obtain a piece of the dimension-splitting meteorite to merge both dimensions and rule over dinosaur and humankind.
This meteorite MacGuffin is in the hands of Daisy (Samantha Mathis), an orphan from the dino dimension who is revealed to be the daughter of the noble king that was deposed by Koopa and devolved into a gigantic fungus that is spreading across Dinohattan.
I said it was gonna get weird.
Heroes
Finally, we have our heroes, Mario and Luigi, the Mario brothers. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo are two hapless Brooklyn plumbers who get swept up with Daisy and her adventure into the dino dystopia.
Look, you’re a smart person, viewer. At a glance, you can see how lost in translation Super Mario Bros. looks when you think about what Super Mario Bros. is as an idea. So, it’s a no-brainer that the entire artistic take of the movie turned audiences off in a big way.
But here’s where I’m on the side of Super Mario Bros., because a bold failure is always far more interesting than a safe success. And though the dark sci-fi riff Super Mario Bros. is doing was never going to be box office gold for this property, I support taking these kinds of big artistic swings.
David Ayer’s Suicide Squad and Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four are movies I will defend even though they aren’t good because I appreciate seeing such distinct attempts at these kinds of adaptations. But, just like those two superhero blockbusters, Super Mario Bros. also had to deal with a meddling studio changing what the movie was originally supposed to be.
After going through pre-production, casting, and building sets, Disney bought up the film’s distribution rights and demanded script changes that lightened everything up as much as possible, leaving the finished movie with some serious tonal problems.
Not to mention that the cast didn’t learn about these major script changes until they were in North Carolina for the shoot. Directors Morton and Jankel were so mad that they wanted to leave the production. A number of injuries to the main cast and other issues led to an extremely contentious production.
But what matters to the bean counters isn’t how awful your production was or how wild your ideas are. All that matters is green and we ain’t talking 1-Up mushrooms.
Disaster & Redemption
Super Mario Bros. opened at the number four spot at the box office and struggled to make just under $21 million in the U.S. against a budget well into the $40-$50 million range. It managed to make Siskel & Ebert’s list of worst films that year, so critics and audiences were turned off in a big way.
For years, Super Mario Bros. was part of the “video game movie curse” narrative as a warning to any other future adaptations.
But then, a funny thing happened.
It turns out that because of its bizarre take, its tumultuous production, and even its eventual failure, fans began to find a lot that fascinated them about Super Mario Bros. I saw it as a kid and even though I’ve never really liked the movie as a story or a journey with interesting characters, I find it deeply intriguing as a movie production.
And I’m not the only one. Super Mario Bros. has amassed a true cult following, so much that a special edition 4K remaster was released, and the collector’s edition that I proudly own features an entire book of scripts and a huge book of production art and photos.
Super Mario Bros. is one of the most obvious failures in movie history, but there’s no denying it’s a movie with a vision. And those kinds of movies always manage to find their audience. They might not be the enormous kind of audience that propels your movie to a billion-dollar box office, but they are the kind of audience that can find and appreciate the best parts of a failure.
If you’d like to hear my deeper review of Super Mario Bros., check out the GenreVision Movie Club podcast where we did a whole episode on it. If you dig this video and our other Why It Failed videos, make sure to let us know in the comments. Click the like button and subscribe to the channel or we’ll be devolved into Goombas. Thanks for watching Giant Freakin Robot, and remember: trust the fungus.
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